Brightness animation problem

Question

Following on from, and possibly related to my previous post "Re-rendering Canon XF footage" a few days ago, something strange happened today.
I was attempting to animate a brightness increase across a short clip, when it decided to not work (the brightness animation, not PPro).
There's five video tracks, with Sony Z1P footage in 1-3, and Canon XF300 footage in 4 and 5. I'm mostly using track 1 (my own footage, of course), track 2 (2nd Sony camera), and track 5. I use opacity keyframing to dissolve from one track to another, rather than intercut clips on a single video track, and it's been working very well.
This is footage from 3 performances of a stage musical, and there are lighting differences between the performances (not to mention issues with costume continuity, but that's another story - no matter how times you tell schoolchildren to wear the same costume every night, someone has to get creative!). This particular transition has a large drop in brightness as some dialogue finishes and a song starts (courtesy of lighting control dimming the scene too early), so I wanted to animate an increase in brightness on the clip to lessen the obviousness of the transition from bright to dark to bright again.
Anyway, I added "Brightness and contrast" to the clip, clicked the clock symbol at the point on the clip where it started to go dim, then moved the indicator across the clip to the darkest point, added another keyframe, and moved again to where it started to get brighter, and added another keyframe. Then I increased the brightness level at the mid-point to something less dim, and moved the indicator back to the start to watch it. It worked OK the first time, then I adjusted the brightness level again, and it acted as though I hadn't applied any correction at all.
After trying various undo and redo options, I cleared the effect and started from scratch. No improvement - the clip acted as though nothing had been done to it.So I cleared the clip and added it again, and added the effect again - no good. At this point I closed the project without saving, opened it again, and tried adding the effect again - no good.
Then I started looking on the forums for answers. I started a new project and tried it - no good. Next, the advice was to start PPro with alt and shift keys held down to re-set preferences and plug-ins cache, and to clear the media cache database. This made a lot of red appear in the render bar (fair enough), so I started re-rendering. When that finished I went to the most recent piece of added footage (Canon footage in track 5), but it was indicated as off-line. I tried to re-link it and got the "generic error" message. I cleared and tried to re-import it (directly and through media browser) and still it wouldn't import. I restored from a backup and still no go. The clips immediately preceeding and subsequent were OK, and the offending clip plays fine in VLC, and in the Canon Utility program. I then proceeded to do an export from the Canon Utility, and it imported OK into PPro - same footage, although it came in 5 separate clips, not a single file of spanned sub-clips.
Then the playback was stuttery although there was no red in the render bar. So I saved it, exited, and PPro crashed with a 0xc0000005 error (isn't that a Windows 'access denied' error?).
I've opened the project again and it appears to be OK, so I'll continue working, but I'm still concerned that one or more items in the project file have become corrupted - first the brightness animation stops working (and I haven't tried adding the effect again). The footage is fine, but PPro thinks it can't import it under its original name and location. As soon as I export it from Canon Utility with a different name, its OK. If there's something corrupted in the project file or an associated project information or metadata file, should I use Project Manager to bundle it all into a new project, or is there some way to extract something more detailed than "generic error" from the file import module?
Sorry for the long post - does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi,
Try using Recovery Manager to reinstall your original Nvidia Graphics software - the procedure for using recovery manager to reinstall Software and Drivers is detailed in the document on the link below.  Note:  If you have Intel/Nvidia optimus graphics, reinstall the Intel gpu driver first, then reboot and check if the f2/f3 keys function.
Recovery Manager - Windows 8.
After the reinstallation has completed, restart the notebook.
Regards,
DP-K
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